items tagged with Jason Lee

Vanilla Sky could be subtitled Jerry Maguire Climbs Jacob’s Ladder to Reveal What Dreams May Come, and if that’s not enough reason to run for the theatre’s exits, the movie’s actual presentation should be.

Though the competition is fierce – The Insider, All That Jazz, maybe even Beetlejuice – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie that made smoking look more repellant than David Mirkin’s comedy Heartbreakers.

Almost Famous, writer-director Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical hymn to the joys and heartbreaks of rock ’n’ roll, is filled with extraordinarily lovely details and an uncanny fondness for the film’s 1970s setting. It’s engaging, gorgeously lit, and filled with goodwill. The things it’s not are believable, challenging, or memorable. It has obviously been made with great love – Crowe spent years trying to turn his youthful experiences into a movie – and Crowe’s attention to the minutiae of the rock scene is heady and alluring. But Almost Famous ends up as far less than the sum of its parts, a movie so intoxicated by its period that elements like character and conflict barely exist; despite its look and the rave reviews being showered on it, the film itself feels empty.